How many times have you needed a taxi, called and it never showed? Or tried hailing a taxi on the street and it seemed that you were in a black hole of cabs? Yeah, that’s exactly the situation the founders of TaxiNow found themselves in one night and from it build a way for people to find taxis close by and hail them, with an iPhone app:

TaxiNow—TaxiNow a free iPhone app that allows passengers to see the exact location of nearby available taxis on their iPhone map and hail them with one simple click. And passengers can track the taxi all the way to their pickup location through Apple’s GPS. Our goal is to make the the experience of hailing a taxi way better. The taxi industry is inefficient and we’re certain we can reduce the amount of time passengers wait for taxis and reduce the idle time for drivers. TaxiNow is available to any passenger and driver, anywhere in the world but the initial focus will be in Vancouver, Canada. We plan on rolling this out to other cities across Canada and revolutionize the way taxis are hailed. This will be the official launch of TaxiNow. We will demo the product and actually hail a taxi to Canvas Lounge to show how just how powerful what we have built is!

This is the second time I had a chance to chat with the folks at TaxiNow. The app is gaining traction, but one of the key gaps is that taxi drivers need iPhone and keep the app front and center for it to work. Yep, they have some work to do, but … well listen and watch for yourself: